Thanks to Sarah‘s suggestion, I added the Tweet Old Posts plugin a while ago to cover a quiet time of heads down a-working followed by the team dropping like flies with flu and the like!

During that time, the work put into our older blog posts was double useful for us, sending out a tweet for the older posts, that people won’t yet have read or who might have forgotten about.

And the effect on the site visits has been significant, considering we’ve not been creating fresh daily posts, we are still getting a lot of new visitors, who are then reading further.

So – how to set it up yourself:

From your Dashboard, go to Plugins, Add New and search for Tweet Old Posts – install now and Activate

In your Dashboard’s sidebar, you can now see a section Tweet Old Post – it will be under the main sections, near the bottom.

There you want to set any pre-fix to the post title, the intervals, etc – work your way through those.

And you will want to authorise the plugin to use your Twitter account – that’s at the top of the settings page.

And away you go…

A couple of things to consider when doing the same for your WordPress blog:

don’t overdo it – I’ve reset the interval for tweeting old Blogmistress posts to just a couple of times a day now, at least until we tweet more generally (at present we’re only tweeting posts and that’s not my preferred way to use Twitter).

set up an extra category just for this purpose, so that you can be sure that only relevant old posts will be retweeted.

If you don’t want to be a-tweeting on Christmas Day, remember to de-activate for the duration (I think I got away with it but would have preferred not to have been business twittering on such a day).

Chatting with a designer colleague last week, he wanted to explore just how useful WordPress can be in bringing together the various aspects of social media these days. How can the power of WordPress be harnessed with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and goodness knows how much more?

Perhaps the most immediately obvious channel that WordPress can include is Twitter – not only by encouraging us to “tweet this” but also showing us a feed of tweets (hopefully relevant!), encouraging visitors to “follow me”, and more. And now with Facebook joining in, we can show that we “like” a blog post to all of our friends and connections – sharing our information with those that are happy keeping their social media within the one place.

And then there are our favourite online networks, forums and the link – YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, 4Networking, Ecademy – there are many to suit our myriad profiles.

The leap from LinkedIn to Facebook is not going to suit everyone, so by including both on your blog – using your blog as the central hub – you appeal to your wider audience. Give your readers what they want – some like Facebook, others like LinkedIn, some will only see your YouTube video if you include it elsewhere, and Twitter – which some of us love and others cannot see the point.

Use your WordPress blog as the hub and that way:

you can be sure of owning the content

bring together comments,

update each of the online platforms you use

benefit from the activity for your website (rather than someone else’s!)

The thing to do is indeed make use of the forums and platforms, but bring it “home” so that your blog and website gets the benefit too.

There are many WordPress plugins that enable you to harness the power of Twitter; the following are a few that you may find useful:

TweetMeme Button
Used here on blogmistress.com – the retweet button up in the right hand corner of posts! It’s really simple to use and let’s anyone retweet your post. So if you’re reading this – click it to try it out 🙂

This plugin can send a default message when new and edited posts/pages are published but also you have the option of writing a custom tweet for a post.

It’s all pretty simple to setup, there are advanced options but to test this out I was happy with the default settings and just popped in my twitter account username and password.

And if you want to show your Twitter stream in your sidebar, there are a number of plugins available, but we like the look of Twitter Widget Pro – partly because it has been tested on the latest version of WordPress (at time of writing – some weeks into the latest release) and because it handles twitter feeds well, including the @username, #hashtag, and link parsing, amongst other things.

Of course, as with all plugins, the thing to do is search for your ideal plugin yourself, taking into account when it was last updated, how many people have downloaded it, and even popping to the WordPress.org site to view comments, etc.